Aurora

Definition - What does Aurora mean?

Aurora is a cloud-oriented database engine solution that is made available through Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS). It is an alternative to SAP and Oracle's MySQL, and is touted to offer the performance and availability of high-grade commercial database solutions with the affordability commonly associated with open-source database solutions. Aurora is MySQL-compatible and is highly scalable, allowing users to scale storage capacity without the associated downtime and performance degradation.

Techopedia explains Aurora

Aurora is a relational database engine that combines the availability and speed of commercial databases with the cost-effectiveness and simplicity of open-source offerings. Some of the reasons why it is highly available are its cloud component and the fact that it is hosted by Amazon Web Services, which allows cloud computing levels of availability and scalability.

Aurora joins other database engines such as Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server made available through Amazon's RDS.

Aurora has the following features:

MySQL compatibility

Availability and durability - It is durable because it replicates six copies of data across three availability zones and then it backs up data continuously to Amazon S3. Instances can recover and restart in less than a minute, and recovery from physical failure is transparent.

Fast - It is fives times faster than MySQL running on the same hardware.

Highly scalable - An Aurora database instance can be scaled up to 32 virtual CPUs and 244 GB of memory. Up to 15 Aurora replicas can be added across the three availability zones. Storage automatically grows, and there is no need for provisioning or manually managing storage.

Highly secure - Data is isolated within Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, and it automatically encrypts data at rest and in transit.